| Summary: | The article analyzes I. V. Kireevsky’s philosophical viewpoint on the interrelation between church and state in Christian society. The Orthodox Christian relation of Church and state is according to Kireevsky a hierarchical monoduality, similar to the relation of spirit and fl esh in a human individual, wherein the Church sets spiritual reference points for the social body and navigates its movement towards the supreme goals of life, never interfering, however, with the internal development of the profane social body. The Church predominates in a Christian state, yet does not govern externally. The Russian philosopher himself had detached his view with equal distinctness from the Catholic mixed, ‘clerical and laical’ design, as well as from the ideal of a state church, which is of Protestant provenience, and it is also clearly diff erent from the political program of ‘liberation of the Church’ and its separation from the state, which was so popular with the Slavophiles in later times. Church and state represent for Kireevsky an issue for which it is ‘the best time to awaken’. We try to clarify this belief in context of general historical views of the Slavophiles and their anticipations concerning the end of the Petrine era of Russian history and the Orthodox revival in Russia.
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